YA Review: Fortune's Kiss
Fortune's Kiss by Amber Clement (Union Square & Co., 368p., ages 13-up, 9781454950219)
Fortune's Kiss is a riveting, radiant, and often bloody YA novel that features two young women in dire straits who compete for their hearts' desires in a gambling house with unbelievably high stakes.
Best friends Lo and Mayté made a pact as children: if the magical gambling hall, Fortune's Kiss, ever returned to Milagro, they would work together to win the ultimate prize of "life-changing fortunes
and their most desperate wishes granted." Now, a decade later, Fortune's Kiss reappears, and the girls are more determined than ever. Seventeen-year-old Lo dreams of finding her mother while also escaping unwanted suitors and her abusive father. Mayté, also 17, who has watched her father drink and gamble away her family's fortune, dreams of becoming a famous painter. But the casino's stakes are enormous--losers return "a mess" (if they return at all) and the steep price of entry is "a large sum in golden coins," a person's "most prized treasure," or, rumor has it, blood. Nonetheless, Lo and Mayté try their luck. The young women enter "El Beso de la Fortuna," where they are immediately drugged, pitted against each other, and forced to play by the house's own secret--and deadly--rules.
Fortune's Kiss is Amber Clement's vivid, colorful, and intense debut, a tale steeped in a magical Latine culture, peppered with Spanish words and phrases, and chock-full of the macabre. Gripping and gory, the novel features two strong heroines who struggle to hold on to what's most important to them while at the mercy of magic, a seemingly sentient gambling house, and even each other. --Lynn Becker, reviewer, blogger, and children's book author. Originally printed in
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